


Something to Fight For

by IdrisTardis7878



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Captain Swan - Freeform, F/M, It was super cute, domestic!cs, fluff-ish, miss charlotte jones, this was based on that Once BTS video of colin juggling that was everywhere a couple of years ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 05:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16948104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IdrisTardis7878/pseuds/IdrisTardis7878
Summary: Just a quiet morning in Emma and Killian's home with their young daughter Charlotte - or is it?





	Something to Fight For

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr on November 6, 2016. Original author's note was as follows:
> 
> A/N: Inspired by the amazing BTS videos and gifs of Colin juggling and doing other tricks that have recently been floating around the fandom. Started off as just a bit of fluff, but ended up going in a slightly different direction – still, mainly fluff though. Fluff with feels? Yeah. That. About 1,460 words of it. Hope you all enjoy!!

Shafts of golden sunlight poured across the wide, well-worn wooden floorboards, lending the cozy bedroom a warm glow even as a crisp spring breeze set the curtains fluttering at the window casement and carried a faint hint of wood smoke inside. The excited barking of a dog floated up from the street below, followed quickly by the call of its owner – after they passed by the quiet was only broken by the soft birdsong emanating from the branches of the nearby trees.

In short, it was a gorgeous morning – one that many people would already be up and about and enjoying to the fullest. But as far as Emma was concerned, it was the perfect morning to curl up in bed and revel in being cocooned in the fluffy down comforter. She’d had a  _very_  long week. The number of townspeople getting into the most  _ridiculous_ scrapes – each of which generated its own mini-mountain of paperwork – had never seemed to end. But today her father was on call at the station and she intended to take full advantage of her first fully free Saturday all month by indulging in one of her favorite pastimes.

Sleeping in and luxuriating in the soft, warm comfort of the bed she shared with Killian.

Preferably she’d actually get to be snuggled up  _with_  Killian, but she had a feeling that if she turned and over and looked at his side of the bed she’d find it lacking a certain sleep-rumpled pirate. She was loathe to open her eyes, but there were no noises signaling that he was anywhere in the room, and she couldn’t feel the warmth of his chest against her back (it had become very clear, very shortly after they began living together, that spooning was their default sleeping position – something she had  _no_  complaints about). The familiar weight of his arm was also missing from around her waist, and she didn’t feel the press of his knees fitted against the backs of her own.

After falling back into a doze for a few minutes, she finally mustered up the energy to flop onto her other side and blearily crack open one eye. Just as she’d thought, she was greeted by the sight of very soft, navy blue cotton sheets that were perfectly lovely in their own right – but were made less appealing by not being wrapped around a certain dashing sailor. Emma slid her hand towards his side of the bed – it was cool to the touch.  _He must’ve been up for a while already_ , she mused hazily before sleep pulled her under once more.

It wasn’t too much later – maybe half an hour or so – when she woke again, and this time she knew there would be no getting back to sleep. The most delicious smells of bacon and fresh-brewed coffee were wafting up the stairs and her stomach betrayed her, letting out a piteous sounding grumble-whine. The noise was so loud in the stillness of the room that she couldn’t help but chuckle to herself.

She turned over again, finally sitting up and leaning back towards the headboard and stretching her arms above her head. She tried to work out a particularly persistent kink that was stubbornly hanging on below her right shoulder blade. Making a mental note to see if Killian would be willing to massage it for her later – she  _seriously_  doubted she’d have any trouble convincing him – she scrambled out of bed.

Slipping on a pair of pajama pants under her loose sleep-shirt and running a brush quickly through her hair before pulling it up into a rather haphazard ponytail, she then proceeded to pad quietly down the stairs. She could hear the murmur of voices – one deeper in tone and speaking at greater length, and the other higher pitched and more intermittent. Though it was clear that there was an animated conversation going on in the kitchen, the speakers’ words remained indistinct until Emma reached the ground floor and stepped off the last stair.

“Not impressed with that, are you?” she heard Killian say, his voice rather amused. “That used to be your favorite.”

In reply, Emma heard a very familiar happy giggle. She rounded the corner into the kitchen in time to see their daughter’s long blond curls swing back and forth as she shook her head and answered Killian. “No, Papa! New trick please.”

“What’s this now?” Emma spoke up, moving over to where the five year old sat at the kitchen table, crouching down beside her chair. She wrapped one arm around the little girl and pressed a quick kiss to the crown of her head before pulling back to catch her eye. “Charlie, are you giving your Papa a hard time so early in the morning?”

“It seems that the good Lady Charlotte has grown bored with her poor father’s juggling and has demanded a new entertainment,” Killian said with a wink at them both. “Luckily, I think I might have just the thing.”

Charlie clapped excitedly and Emma found herself laughing at their daughter’s enthusiasm. She looked up at Killian. “Alright then Papa, what’ve you got?” she asked, smirking at him.

He arched an eyebrow at her, but said nothing. Instead, he picked up the two oranges that he must have been using to juggle with before she’d come downstairs. Raising them both in his right hand with a flourish, he cleared his throat and began to juggle them both single-handed. “Well, it starts off as you might remember,” he said, picking up speed with his tosses, “but then there’s a bit of a twist.”

In a maneuver that was almost too fast for Emma to process, Killian caught one of the oranges in his hand while the other sailed downward until it bounced off his bicep, changing its direction. Arcing perfectly sideways, it flew to the left until he speared it mid-air with his hook. Charlie was ecstatic, laughing and clapping loudly. Emma gave her one more cuddle before standing up and moving around the table towards Killian.

“Pretty impressive,” she murmured appreciatively, stepping close to him and raising up on her tiptoes to give him a brief kiss, “but you do know she’s going to want you to keep coming up with more new tricks now, right?”

“Aye,” he replied, dropping the orange in his hand back into the fruit bowl on the table and wrapping his now-free arm around her. “But you know I love a challenge.”

“Mmm,” Emma nodded, turning in his embrace to look at Charlie. A powerful wave of love and affection for Killian and the little family they’d forged together over the last few years with Charlie (and the newly-minted college freshman Henry, who was just a couple of hours away at Bowdoin) surged through her. She leaned her head against Killian’s shoulder as she took in the sight of their daughter’s smiling face. Closing her eyes, she exhaled a happy sigh. “Yeah, I do.”

-/-

Emma startled awake with a gasp, the vivid images she’d just been immersed in fading quickly as she blinked and brought her trembling hand up to scrub across her face. She felt Killian shift behind her. “Love, s’everything alright?” his sleep-slurred voice rumbled near her ear. The tip of his nose brushed along the shell as he spoke, sparking a shiver that raced through her whole body. “Did y’have a nightmare?”

She shook her head slightly. “No,” she murmured. “No, I think it was another vision.”

He was instantly alert at that, immediately tensing behind her. His hand gripped her hip more tightly and his voice was cautious, almost hesitant, when he asked. “The same as you’ve had before?”

Emma rolled over to face him, sliding her hands up until one rested above his heart and the other was anchored in the hair at the nape of his neck. She took a deep breath before looking into his eyes and smiling. She shook her head slowly. “No,” she said, a note of hope creeping into her voice. “So very different.”

Killian reached his hand up and cupped her face, his thumb swiping just below her eye. “Then why the tears, love?”

She’d not even noticed she was crying until she felt him brushing away the wetness that had tracked across her cheek. Chuckling softly, she smiled at him again. “Because it was a happy one,” she scratched her fingers gently through his hair.

Slowly, the corners of his mouth tugged upwards into a brilliant smile. “Well then, love, I’m all ears if you’d like to share.”

As they lay there together and Emma told him of what she’d seen, she found herself hoping, for once, that one of her visions would actually come true.


End file.
